The invention concerns a firing mechanism by percussion for a mortar or similar weapon, and a mortar or similar weapon incorporating such a mechanism.
Apart from muzzle-loading mortars, there are also known to exist mortars loaded from the rear, whether from a drum-type magazine of shells, as described in FR-A-2 402 852 or from a loading chamber being moved perpendicularly to the axis of the discharge tube as described, for example, in FR-A-2 163 932. While the usual muzzle-loading mortars are equipped with a firing mechanism which simply consists of a firing-pin rigidly fixed to the baseplate of the weapon, this approach is unsuitable for the advanced mortars of the types described in the aforesaid documents, nor generally for rear-loading mortars, in which one part of the discharge tube that serves as a shell carrier is to be displaced relative to the discharge tube proper.
The problem thus arises of providing such mortars with a firing mechanism using mechanical percussion which would be at once reliable, capable of containing the pressure of the propellant gas upon discharge, and also capable of withstanding the recoil acceleration in the case of weapons equipped with an arrangement for absorbing this recoil and, finally, enabling automatic reloading upon the counter-recoil of the weapon as required, in particular, for rapid-fire mortars.